2017年6月英语六级仔细阅读1题源文章

　　The right place

　　Depositing data on a personal website is unlikely to be the best way to get it reused and cited. For a start, the website may not be around in five years, says William Michener, director of e-science initiatives at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Michener is principal investigator for a multinational programme called DataONE, which is funded by the US National Science Foundation and promotes best practices to scientists as part of its aim to make data more discoverable. Journal publishers back up their research papers with the help of non-profit archiving services such as Portico and CLOCKSS, which are financed by participating libraries and publishers, and which store material on a number of servers so that it will not disappear if a publisher goes bankrupt. Some data publishers have similar contingency plans, and Piwowar recommends looking into them. If no back-up plans are in place, she says, “it suggests they haven't prioritized well enough how to steward their data”.

　　Just as important as sharing data publicly is making sure that other researchers can understand them. Susanna Assunta-Sansone, associate director of the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford, UK, says that putting out data without noting what it means will ensure that “it's not really reusable”. To avoid this, researchers must choose appropriate metadata: descriptions of the data's content and how they are arranged and set up. This type of curation is useful not just for human readers, but also for computer programmes that might be used to search through or connect data sets. Intelligent searches often rely on whatever descriptive metadata researchers have attached to the data. The metadata are read by an application programming interface (API), a set of commands that computer programmes use to interact with data stores and pull information from them. Not all data repositories use APIs; those that do not may not be the best places to store or release information, because it could be hard for anyone to find.

　　Sites that are dedicated to hosting particular types of data, such as DNA sequences, usually tell submitters what format is appropriate. They may require data to be entered using an online form or following specific instructions. By contrast, generalist sites — such as institutional repositories, data journals or ventures similar to figshare.com — may have looser requirements. This has the potential to result in a blizzard of different formats and descriptive tags, which could make discovering and reusing data more difficult, so researchers should pay close attention to the norms in their fields.

　　Decisions about metadata standards should be made early in a research project, says Michener. DataONE has provided a primer on best practices, as has a tool called DataUp, run through the University of California Curation Center in Oakland to help researchers to create data packages that are good enough to put online. Other aspects of data-sharing to consider early on include the information's sensitivity and whether some parts must be stripped out to avoid, for example, identifying human study participants or the locations of endangered species. Researchers also need to be clear about whether they will allow their data sets to be used for any purpose, or whether they would like to limit reuse to, for example, non-commercial applications. One widely understood way of documenting reuse rights is by giving the data one of several different Creative Commons licences.

　　Ultimately, says Michener, early-career researchers need to pay attention to new and developing ways to share data, and to the standardized formats that are emerging to make data easier to search and discover. Those who do not, he says, should rethink why they are doing research. “I think we are just now reconnecting with what science is all about — not just creating new knowledge, but also sharing the information and data that underpins those discoveries.”

【→六级答案这里最全←】